With that absurdly self-absorbed password, the bust of Salazar Slytherin slowly opened its mouth, revealing a passage wide enough for two people to walk through side by side.
This was the passage meant for the Basilisk. If that giant monster could get through, then humans certainly could.
Leonard casually dismissed Voldemort's noseless mimic body, pinched his nose shut, and climbed up along Salazar Slytherin's beard into the passage.
A place where a Basilisk had lived for years was never going to smell pleasant. The rank, fishy stench was nauseating.
Leonard frowned and walked farther in. After only a short distance, he suddenly stopped.
Not far ahead, something crouching in the darkness drew his eye. The huge silhouette looked like a long dragon lying prone on the ground.
Frowning, Leonard cast Wand-Lighting Charm. A glowing orb drifted forward and lit it up.
It was an enormous skeleton, and from the shape it was obviously another Basilisk. This one was astonishingly huge, far larger than the Basilisk Leonard had killed outside.
When it was alive, it must have been far stronger than the one Leonard had dealt with.
Unfortunately, all that remained now was a skeleton. The eyes had long since rotted away, and the venom in the fangs had long since dried up.
"Another Basilisk?" Leonard walked over and touched the bones, gauging how weathered they were.
Basilisks, being magical creations, decayed extremely quickly, so even the skeleton they left behind made it hard to determine exactly when they had died.
But that did not stop Leonard from uncovering the truth behind it, such as how a Basilisk with a maximum lifespan of roughly nine hundred years could have lasted until now.
If Salazar Slytherin wanted to protect the Chamber, then he would naturally have needed a fully grown Basilisk as a guardian.
But an adult Basilisk surviving all the way to the present was impossible. So that meant he must have put a second, juvenile Basilisk into the Chamber and used some unknown method to let the younger one replace the older one after it died of age.
The only question was how Salazar Slytherin had managed such a seamless handoff between the two.
Still, that was not what mattered.
What mattered was whether this skeleton still had any value as material.
That would require testing.
A semi-energetic man-eating flower suddenly appeared in Leonard's left hand. It opened its jaws and sucked at the Basilisk skeleton, and the huge frame rapidly shrank as it was drawn into the flower's mouth.
Naturally, the miniature man-eating flower only actively devoured foreign objects under Leonard's control. It was not exactly ideal to leave experimental material lying out in the open. Better to store it away somewhere safe.
With the Basilisk skeleton gone, the space before him looked much cleaner. Under the light of the Wand-Lighting Charm, the stone door at the end of the passage came into view.
"This should be the real Chamber, right?" Leonard walked over and slowly pushed the stone door open.
The heavy door gradually swung inward. Air that had stood still for decades began to move again, and bright light fell into the room, illuminating rows of empty bookshelves and a desk in one corner.
This seemed to be a hidden library.
Unfortunately, the shelves that should have been crammed with books were completely empty, left only to gather dust.
The first thing Leonard noticed was those bookshelves. In the wizarding world, knowledge is power was not just a saying but an actual truth, so the most precious things were usually magical books.
"So clean..." Leonard walked closer, brushed his fingers over the shelves, and rubbed the dust between his fingertips, sighing.
He was not being sarcastic.
He was genuinely lamenting what a complete bastard Voldemort was, to come into a place like this and clear out every last book.
The most valuable things in this Chamber should have been those magical books preserved from nearly a thousand years ago. Yet after Voldemort had been here, not a single one remained.
There was no doubt that Voldemort must have been the first person to visit this room. His rise likely had a great deal to do with the knowledge hidden here. Otherwise, no matter how much of a genius he was, it would have been hard for him to stand against Dumbledore on equal footing.
Most of the knowledge Salazar Slytherin left behind would likely have been dark magic, or rather, the ancestor of modern dark magic.
But in that era, ancient magic had already become a rare inheritance, while blood magic had only recently declined. There were probably quite a few books here about blood magic as well.
Voldemort had taken them all. Whether he destroyed them after reading them or kept them as part of his collection, Leonard had no idea.
He circled the bookshelves a few times. After finding nothing useful, he turned and went to the desk in the corner.
Very quickly, he noticed something strange about it.
The desk was spotless.
Voldemort had definitely been here before, but that had still been decades ago. Normally, the desk should have been covered in dust by now.
Yet it looked as though it had escaped the constraints of time itself, untouched by the years.
There was a book lying on the desk, resting there quietly as if waiting for its owner to open it.
The material looked like parchment. The writing on it appeared to have been made with fresh ink. Rather than a proper book, it looked more like a notebook.
Leonard walked over and glanced at the writing.
"Old English... Could this be Salazar Slytherin's own manuscript? But why would Voldemort leave only this one behind?"
Given Voldemort's tendency to strip a place bare, Leonard did not believe for a second that he would thoughtfully leave a notebook for whoever came after.
If he had left it, there had to be some special reason.
Could there be some terrible trap on it?
Leonard speculated for a moment, then shook his head.
Voldemort could not have been very old when he first entered the Chamber. If there had been any lethal threat here, the first person to die would have been him.
So the chance that this notebook carried deadly magic was probably low.
Speculating in the abstract would get him nowhere. Leonard decided to inspect it himself.
Even so, he still put on dragon-hide gloves before reaching out to touch the notebook.
The moment he touched it, he immediately sensed something strange.
Hard.
That was Leonard's first impression.
It felt like touching cold jade, as though a solid layer of crystal separated him from the notebook itself and kept him from reaching the real thing.
It felt like looking at an exhibit in a museum case.
Leonard frowned and tried to turn a page, but failed. The pages seemed welded shut, completely impossible to lift.
He knocked on it a couple of times. No sound came back at all, as though the notebook did not exist.
All those signs made Leonard's expression turn startled.
This desk had been fixed in place by some kind of force, as though it had been cut off from time itself.